Butthole Surfers are perhaps the most perversely confrontational and
calculatedly outrageous American post-punk band. Their stage shows have
included everything from backdrop projections of auto accidents and sex-change
operations to androgynous nude dancers, crude pyrotechnics, and the incessant
gross-out shenanigans of singer Gibby Haynes. (At an early show he removed
the dress he was wearing during a performance and-depending on who tells the
story-either simulated sex or had sex with one of the band's dancers.) Though
the Butthole Surfers' music combines the noisy, avant-garde tendencies of
late-Seventies no wave with the throbbing, distorted drive of hardcore, much
of it is informed by classic, psychedelic rock.

Haynes, whose father hosted a children's TV show in Dallas under the name
Mr. Peppermint, met Paul Leary in 1977 while attending San Antonio's Trinity
College. Four years later, Haynes, then doing graduate work in accounting, and
Leary, son of the business school's dean, formed a band. They became Butthole
Surfers when an announcer mistook one of their song titles for their band
name. In San Francisco in 1981, the Surfers met the Dead Kennedys' Jello
Biafra, who signed them to his Alternative Tentacles label. The band's
self-titled first album contained the legendary dada-hardcore anthem, "The
Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave." Between 1982 and 1985 the Surfers went
through a succession of bass players and drummers. They toured constantly,
perfecting their bizarre show by adding dancers, sometimes two drummers, and
cultivating a hard-core cultish Deadhead-style following. Membership
stabilized with the addition of King Coffey on drums in 1983.

In 1985 the group signed with Touch and Go, and its music got even weirder
and more depraved. Haynes' gut-wrenching sleaze and pseudo-Satanic ranting
hit an all-time low on such songs as "Lady Sniff" (Psychic... Powerless...)
and "Sweet Loaf" (Locust Abortion Technician's spoof of Black Sabbath's "Sweet
Leaf"), while Leary's inventive lead guitar chugged and meandered around newly
added instrumentation such as acoustic guitars, piano, organ, violin, and
strange effects, like speeded-up and slowed-down vocals, and tape
manipulations. Rembrandt Pussyhorse stands as one of the most "out"
psychedelic albums of the post-punk era, featuring snaky, Middle Eastern-like
instrumentation and drones, twisted folk melodies, avant-garde improvisation,
industrial noise and feedback, and gastrointestinal sounds. Haynes' attempts
to shock include deranged laughter, Exorcist-like growls, and lyrics such as
"There's a creep in the cellar that I'm gonna let in... and he really freaks
me out when he peels off his skin."

After appearing on the first Lollapalooza Tour in 1991, the Surfers signed
with Capitol. Two years later the band released its major-label debut, the
slightly more accessible Independent Worm Saloon, produced by former Led
Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. In 1993 Haynes also formed a side band with
actor Johnny Depp called P. The Butthole Surfers' music has received radically
mixed reviews, with underground observers generally applauding the
envelope-pushing experimentations, and many mainstream rock critics put off by
the band's constant arty attempts to shock. Through it all, the group is among
the few Eighties fringe acts to rise from independent to major-label status
with its core audience and sound intact. Formed 1981, San Antonio, Texas